A convenient place for me to capture my thoughts and experiences on technology

Add a B2B Gateway to your services

March 4, 2009

Mention SOA or Services and most of your audience would immediately relate it to web-services – yes, the often un-intented misuse of XML over Http that gives the technology and anything related to it a bad name in the world of high-performance J2EE applications.

Two of the biggest culprits in loss of Performance are I/O and Transformation overheads. Web services has both these drawbacks – increased data transfer i.e higher I/O associated with markup overhead of well-formed XML and the CPU utilization overhead when converting XML to Java and back aka. Marshalling.

Web-services and its implementation of XML over Http is good when it is genuinely needed. For e.g. exposing services for consumption with partner organizations where consuming technologies are not known or for integration between disparate systems. However often this need for integration unfortunately leads people to stereotype services as web-services in a SOA.

The question then is : can we reap the benefits of SOA and not suffer the drawbacks of the overheads inherent in web-services? I believe, we can.

Quite a while back, I read this excellent IBM Redbook : Implementing SOA using ESB where the author recommends deploying a B2B Gateway external to the ESB. I must admit it didnot make much sense to me then. I have come to appreciate it much better these days. A B2B Gateway enables consumption of services by “third-party” . This “third-party” may be a client from a different technology platform or from an altogether different organization.

A separate B2B gateway introduces the possibility of:

Making the web-service channel independent of the service implementation and therefore a matter of choice to use (and therefore suffer) the XML over Http interface

Introducing the much required security standards(and implementations) for securing services and data managed by the services

Using third party implementations that specialize in implementing WS-* policies

The SOA runtime therefore must enable services to be written independently of XML and the WS-* specifications/constraints. The Web-service interface is then an optional channel , via a B2B Gateway, to invoke the services.

We, at MindTree, have taken this design further in our implementation of Momentum – an SOA based delivery Platform. Interfaces like JMS and web-services are optional channels provided by the Framework to invoke any deployed service. A schematic that explains this approach is shown below:

The web-service interface is therefore an optional means to invoke your service when you separate the service container and the ESB(optional) from the B2B Gateway and deploy the latter as a separate infrastructure. You can then benefit from the good of web-services without compromising on your service’s QoS.

I, Regunath Balasubramanian, work as a solution architect in Bangalore, India. This blog is a capture of thoughts and experiences on technology, architecture and consulting.
The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer.
regunathb at gmail dot com